Anthony CALDWELL | John A. LYNCH
(UCLA Center for Digital Humanities, Los Angeles, USA)
Keywords: data, interface, publication
Abstract:
The creation of 3D reconstructions of archaeological sites is a valuable tool for public outreach and education. However, since many such models depend not just on physical fragments but also deduction, there is a strong argument that a “scientific” model depends on the full and accessible publication of the underlying data and arguments that went into its construction. At UCLA’s Center for Digital Humanities, we are engaging closely with the challenge of making our models’ underlying data accessible to a viewer without obscuring the model itself, to make it easier for students to engage with models as part of their learning experience.
Anthony Caldwell has been experimenting with the use of Building Information Managment, or BIM (specifically, OpenBIM: http://www.openbim.org/) as a tool for data sharing and model publication. BIM has the advantage of already being an industry standard for architecture and construction; and OpenBIM has the advantage of being open-source, and therefore easier to adapt to any specialized needs that we have (and maintain into the future). We will demonstrate Anthony’s own reconstruction of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, Egypt (http://etc.ucla.edu/projects/lighthouse-of-alexandria/), in which he has been using BIM to communicate data sources and ambiguity, to show its capabilities and contribute to the conversation on scientific modeling and user interface.